Trail Mates (10 page)

Stevie’s eyes lit up. “That’s a wonderful idea,” she
said. “You know, she’s been saving every penny she can for her airfare to visit Kate Devine. I bet this money would put her over the top!”

“Wouldn’t that be terrific?” Lisa agreed. “It’s a deal, then. Giving Carole the money will be a lot more fun than modeling ever was!”

“Who ever said modeling was fun?” Stevie countered.

“Oh, I don’t know. I had a lot of fun in my dreams.”

“Me, too.” Stevie shrugged. Then she turned to the kitchen. “What was that noise?” she asked suspiciously.

Lisa’s face fell. “Oh, no,” she said.

The two girls dashed for the kitchen doorway. When they got there, they saw Stevie’s three brothers seated at the kitchen table, happily finishing off their Rice Krispies Treats.

Chad, Stevie’s fourteen-year-old brother, was the first to speak. “You’ll be pleased to know that you two made the most delicious treat for us! We loved it and we thank you
very
much!” His eyes twinkled.

Stevie and Lisa were so astonished by his announcement that they could only laugh.

“At least we did something right,” Lisa said.

“Maybe we can have a career as pastry chefs,” Stevie
chimed in, secretly pleased at how much her brothers had liked their cooking.

“Can I have some more?” Michael, the youngest, asked.

Stevie shrugged. “Sure, why not? Come on, Lisa, let’s cook up another batch.”

Lisa happily reached for the marshmallow bag and poured from it into a large measuring cup.

“I
JUST CAN’T
wait for the dance contest,” Lynne bubbled, her eyes sparkling as she gazed at the colonel.

“What dance contest?” Carole asked suspiciously. Since Lynne seemed so good at planning everybody’s life, Carole was more than a little bit concerned that she might find herself in a dance contest.

The four of them—Carole, Scott Babcock, Lynne, and Carole’s father—were seated at a table in the ballroom of the Officers’ Club at the Marine Corps base at Quantico. Usually, this was the dining room, but tonight it had been transformed. Toys for Tots was a project sponsored by the Marine Corps Reserve, in which the Corps raised money to buy toys for children whose parents couldn’t afford presents for them. The ballroom was decorated like a child’s paradise. The ceiling
was hidden by fluffy pink and blue cotton puff clouds. Suspended beneath the clouds were wonderfully inviting toys: stuffed animals, trucks, dolls, baseball gloves. The walls around the room were covered with posters advertising toys and books for children. It was impossible to forget the purpose of the dance. Carole hoped they raised a lot of money for the very worthy cause. But just then she was more concerned about a certain dance contest.

“So what about the dance contest?” Carole asked dubiously.

“It’s a twist contest!”

“I can’t do the twist!” Carole protested.

“Of course not!” Lynne said. “It’s your dad and I who are going to do the twist. He and I are couple number, uh, eighteen. But not for long. Practically as soon as the contest starts we’ll be
couple number one!
Mitch is the greatest dancer—especially with these old-time dances!”

“What do you mean, ‘old-time dances’?” he teased, pretending his feelings had been hurt. “I’m not so old.” He winked at Carole.

Carole smiled at her father. He did love old songs and dances, as well as movies—not to mention jokes. And apparently he was a good dancer, too. The gyrations involved looked rather strange to Carole, but everybody said he was good, so maybe he was.

“So what’s the prize for couple number one?” Carole asked Lynne.

“
That’s
the good news, honey,” Lynne said. Carole cringed a little bit. She hated it when Lynne called her “honey.” Lynne continued excitedly. “First prize is a pair of round-trip airplane tickets, anywhere in the U.S. Can you believe it? Won’t it be wonderful?”

That was odd. What would Lynne and her father do with airplane tickets? Her father did so much traveling for his job that he really didn’t enjoy traveling. And he would never go on a trip with Lynne and leave Carole alone.
Would he?

“What’s the matter, Carole?” Scott asked.

She hadn’t realized she was making a face. She turned to him. “Nothing, I was just thinking,” she explained.

“You looked like you were thinking bad thoughts,” he persisted.

He was nice about the way he said it, but it felt like he was prying and Carole didn’t want to talk with Scott about Lynne. After all, part of her plan tonight was to try to break up
two
romances. So far, the plan didn’t seem to be working at all.

“Want to dance?” he asked.

“Sure,” she agreed, standing up from the table. It would be nice to be away from Lynne’s gushing for a few minutes at least.

The band was playing a slow dance and Scott seemed unsure of what to do. He glanced around at the other couples.

“Never had to go to dancing school?” Carole asked.

He laughed sheepishly. “I always talked my mother out of it,” he explained.

“It was my
father
who insisted,” Carole told him. “Here, let me show you what to do.” She put his right hand on her back and held his left with her right. “Now, we make little squares on the floor. It’s called a box step. Step slide, step slide. I go backward. You go forward. Then vice versa. Got it? Hey, not bad,” she commented as Scott more or less successfully followed her instructions.

Within a few minutes, they were dancing easily with each other. She only stepped on Scott’s foot once. He only stepped on hers five times.

“You can’t possibly be enjoying this, “he said, observing her grimace as he landed particularly hard on her toe.

“Oh, it’s fine. And besides, it’s better to be here than to be there,” she said, nodding at the table where her father and Lynne were talking with their heads close together.

“You don’t like her?” Scott asked.

“She’s okay, I guess, but she keeps trying to manage my life.”

“It’s hard to imagine somebody pushing
you
around,” he said. Then Scott began watching his feet. Carole knew he was being careful not to step on her toes again. While he concentrated on that, she could think about her father and Lynne some more.

So far, the evening had gone well enough. Carole was comfortable at the Officers’ Club. There were plenty of people she and her father knew. The colonel had introduced Lynne to a lot of the other officers and their wives. Carole and Scott had spent some time with some of the other “military brats” she had known when they had lived on the base and Carole had gone to school there.

The decorations were special. The food was pretty good. The music was nice. Scott was okay. So why wasn’t she having any fun? It could be summed up in one word: Lynne.

Two round-trip tickets to anyplace in the country. If it were just Carole and her father, she knew what she would want to do. She would want the two of them to visit her new friend Kate Devine and her parents at their dude ranch. But Lynne and her dad?

Suddenly, Carole had an awful thought. “Oh, no!” she said.

“Did I step on something?” Scott asked.

“No. It’s just that …” She couldn’t say it. She couldn’t say the word to Scott. Because the word that
was in her mind was “honeymoon.” If two people were going to get married, the one thing they would want, more than anything else, would be two round-trip airplane tickets to anywhere in the country. They wouldn’t want three. Because only two people would go.

That
would explain why Lynne and her dad were so eager to win the prize in the dance contest. That would explain why they were talking to each other with their heads
so
close. And that would explain why Carole had such a bad feeling about the evening!

“Carole, what’s the matter?” Scott asked, suddenly very worried. “Why are you crying?”

Carole was so upset that she hadn’t even realized that she
was
crying.

“I’m not crying,” she said, trying to fake it, but the fact was that the tears were streaming down her face and she couldn’t fool anybody. “I’ve got to go to the ladies’ room,” she said, and then fled from the dance floor. She
had
to be alone!

All the bright colors of the ballroom merged into one gigantic rainbow of confusion. The noise of the crowd and the strains of the music blended into a muddle of discordant sounds. Carole didn’t see any faces, hear any greetings, or even feel the floor under her feet. The only thing she was aware of was one word: honeymoon. It had to be the answer. Lynne and her
father were planning to be married and they were going to go on a trip together afterward.

Carole realized then, as she had never realized before, that she didn’t want to share her father with anybody; and she especially couldn’t stand the idea of sharing him with Lynne!

The tears were pouring out of her eyes so fast that she could barely see as she wound her way through the room. Without even realizing she was doing it, Carole ran smack into a tray caddy, and before she knew what had happened she was on the floor. Her right ankle had caught in the folded-up legs of the caddy, and within seconds it swelled to twice its normal size.

Carole’s tears of anguish and fear were suddenly replaced by tears of pain. Her ankle
hurt.
The first person to reach her was Scott.

He sat down on the floor by her side, taking her hand.

“Are you okay?” he asked.

“I hurt my ankle,” she told him.

He looked at it, examining it carefully. “You sure did that,” he agreed. He turned to the waiter who was standing there and asked him to get some ice, wrapped in a wet cloth napkin. When the waiter returned, Scott applied the ice pack to Carole’s ankle, and the pain began to subside.

When Carole’s father arrived on the scene, he and
Scott helped Carole stand up and hobble back to their table. Scott grabbed a fifth chair, giving Carole something to prop her foot up on, and they soon surrounded her ankle with additional supplies of ice.

“I’ve got so much ice here, I should go skating instead of dancing,” Carole said, trying to make light of the situation.

“I don’t think you’re going to be doing either for a couple of days,” her father said wisely.

“I twisted my ankle like that once,” Lynne said. “It took
weeks
for it to heal.”

Carole groaned. “My ankle’s so swollen, I couldn’t even get my boots on to ride. You can’t mean it that it’s going to last for weeks.”

“Probably not, hon,” her father said. “Scott was pretty smart getting the ice for it so fast, though. That will reduce the swelling. Thanks, Scott,” the colonel said to him.

“Yeah, thank you,” Carole echoed.

“Oh, it was nothing,” Scott said. “I was just the first one there. You would have done the same thing,” he added to her father.

It was true, Carole thought. Scott was there because her father was too busy with Lynne to notice that she had fallen down until a big crowd had gathered around her. She had almost forgotten how upset she had been about Lynne and her father until Scott reminded her.
She still wanted to leave—and the sooner the better.

“Dad, I think I’d better go home,” she said.

“Okay, Carole, I’ll drive you.” He stood up to go.

“Mitch! You can’t
do
that!” Lynne said. “Remember the dance contest? It’s going to kick off in about a half hour. There’s no way you’ll get back in time. And it’s so important.”

The colonel looked at Lynne, then he looked at his daughter. “She’s right, Carole. Can you wait until the contest is over?”

Carole was about to tell her father that there was no way she could wait. This was the opportunity she had hoped for—a surefire way to upset the plans for a honeymoon trip!

“No problem, sir,” Scott interrupted. “The friends we’re staying with live just outside the base. I can call my dad. He’ll pick us up and we’ll see Carole home. You and Ms. Blessing can stay for the dance contest. I saw you out there on the floor earlier. You guys are a shoo-in to win—you can’t miss it!”

Colonel Hanson protested for a moment, but Lynne quickly talked him into accepting Scott’s offer, particularly when Scott reminded him that his father was a doctor and would take a look at Carole’s ankle to be sure it wasn’t more serious than they thought.

Carole sat glumly while the talking was going on.
She didn’t like any of it, but nobody was asking for
her
opinion.

Before the dance contest began, she found herself being settled in the back seat of the Babcocks’ station wagon, to be taken home by Scott and Dr. Babcock. Oh,
sure
, she thought, her father waving as they pulled out of the parking lot.
Your dumb old dance with Lynne is more important than your own daughter!

The good news was that the doctor thought her ankle was just mildly sprained and she would be back up and around by Tuesday. The bad news? It seemed to Carole that
everything
else was bad news.